Joe Colgan remembers 54 years of horses to horsepower with John Deere

Wednesday’s column about John Deere Day, a popular winter get-together for farmers when it was too cold to do anything outside, brought a nostalgic note from an old friend, Joe Colgan of Wyoming.

Joe, later joined by son Tim, ran the John Deere dealership in Wyoming for many years. We learned from his e-mail that if you want to go to a living source for the most history of John Deere tractors and implements, Joe’s your man.

“In 1933, I went to work in the John Deere store in Wyoming,” Colgan writes. “In 1937, I went to work for the John Deere Plow Company (which I believe was in Moline) and my first job was emcee at John Deere Days for dealers in this area.

“In 1947, I became the John Deere dealer in Wyoming. At our John Deere Days, lunch was a barbecue sandwich, baked beans, cake and a drink of coffee or milk. We gave door prizes of grease guns, pails of grease, or tools.” Colgan said in 1987, his last year as owner, everyone got a John Deere cap reading “Colgan Company 1947-1987.” Tim worked for other John Deere dealers in central Illinois for many more years and is also now retired.

“I had been with John Deere 54 years. Times have changed. I am sending this message from the iPad that I received for my 99th birthday! Best wishes, Joe.”

I don’t know if anyone keeps track of such things, but Joe has got to be the oldest living John Deere dealer, retired or working, in the United States, still sharp as a tack and plugged into technology. Take note all you oldsters out there who claim you can’t figure out how to turn on a computer!

Kewanee John Deere enthusiast Brett Bennett tipped me off to a three-part video interview with Joe and Tim done two years ago by someone called “Machinery Pete,” in which they share stories about their John Deere years. Greg “Machinery Pete” Peterson details agricultural equipment prices and trends on his website, Machinerypete.com. He also writes columns for Successful Farming magazine, Implement & Tractor magazine and the Agriculture.com web site and appears on the Machinery Show on RFD-TV.

He did the wide-ranging interview with the Colgans at the dining room table in Joe’s Wyoming home. His wife of more than 70 years, Majella, joined in with stories about raising their 12 kids.

In the interview, Joe tells about taking horses in trade for a tractor in the 1930s and the “merge or close” mandate from John Deere in the late 80s which led to their decision to end a good run. He also talks about how there used to be six John Deere dealers within a 20-mile radius of Wyoming, and the year he got stuck with quite a few two-row tractor-mounted corn pickers when farmers quickly switched to the then-new combines with picker heads.

Page 2 of 2 - He said every farm equipment manufacturer has had one product that every farmer had to have. For Case, it was a good two-bottom plow and for New Holland it was a square hay baler. For John Deere, he says, it was the 4020 tractor.

After making more than 1.25 million two-cylinder tractors, John Deere switched to four-and six-cylinder engines in 1960. Announcement of the change came after seven years of development and $40 million dollars in retooling, which eliminated the “pop, pop, popping” sound associated with Deere since the beginning.

Bigger machinery, more acres and the need for more power, however, finally forced the company to abandon the “Johnny Poppers” and create what were known as “New Generation” tractors, of which the 4020 was one of the first. The 4020 was hugely popular with farmers who didn’t care whether it “popped” or not. It was one of the company’s biggest sellers with 184,000 tractors going out the door between 1963 and 1974, according to one online site.

Joe said he remembers when John Deere brought every dealer in the nation to Dallas for the unveiling of the new-style tractors. “The first thing one of the guys said was ‘Where’s the belt pulley? You can’t have a John Deere without the belt pulley.’” Up until then, most tractors had a round pulley mounted on the side which drove a wide leather belt used to operate grinders, corn elevators, hoists and other machines around the farm. It had been a basic tool of farming, but by the 60s, power take-offs were replacing belts as the way to make things run with a tractor

Joe’s mention of the belt pulley gave an idea of why my dad bought a 1936 John Deere “B” at Taylor & Son in the late 1950s. We had two tractors — a 1944 Farmall “M” and a 1949 Case VAC.

The Farmall was the “big” tractor on the farm and had a belt pulley but was used to carry a New Idea two-row mounted picker. The Case was a smaller tractor and had a side pulley but was used to haul wagonloads of corn from the field to the crib. He needed a stationary tractor at the crib to run the belt-driven gear box which raised the wagon hoist and the elevator which transported ear corn up and into an opening on top of the crib.

The “B” was perfect. It was small and fit well in a tight spot, but powerful enough to run two pieces of equipment as it effortlessly sat and chugged away.

If you want to see Machinery Pete’s interview with Joe and Tim Colgan, type “joe colgan wyoming illinois” into your search engines. All three segments should pop up. They are posted on several ag-related sites and on YouTube.